A truck driver has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying his logbooks and failure to maintain proper records resulting from a fatal July crash on I-55 near Chicago, but reckless homicide charges are still possible in the crash that killed five.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has suspended the operating authority of a single-truck motor carrier after it refused to provide access to company records for an investigation following a highly publicized fatal crash in the Chicago area.

A Chicago-area truck crash that killed four has led to local attention to federal hours-of-service rules, the mandatory electronic logs proposal, and federal efforts to address coercion of drivers to break the law. Deborah Lockridge has more in her On the Road blog.

Just over two weeks after the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ordered an Illinois-based trucking company to shut down all interstate movements, a federal judge on Wednesday ruled it can return to the roadway.